Newbie Help

Map Making with PSP8

Hey. Im a semi new Mudder and I have made out some maps for the MUD i currently play with pencil and paper. The MUD is in testing right now, so its new and there are no maps for it posted on the net yet. You know how there is always that one person who has a big site of all the maps for every MUD/other game? Ya, i wanna be that person for this paticular MUD. I just dont know how to go about doing so. I downloaded the free trial of Paint Shop Pro 8. At first i just want to create the simple boxes with lines connecting them. Then after i want to put text next the the boxes (after i have the general layout of the first city complete) and then maybe i will add backround colors and stuff showing what kind of a terrain it is. The question is..How can i do this? When i first went about doing this, I got the grid setup and everything, but when i went to make the boxes (which i had set to snap to the grid) they would not be visible unless i turned the grid off. I even then tried to merge the layers and everything to get the rooms and stuff on top of the grid. Nothing worked. Could someone help me out on this? I dont know what to do. And if your really bored, maybe give me a quick lesson on what the layers are and what they do/mean. Also any other tips/how to's would be greatly appreciated if posted as a reply to this topic. Thanks so much Topmudsites!

Better make sure the muds staff 'want' people making maps available. Several people on the mud I play at have been nuked for posting such information on the web, but we have a strict non-disclosure of information you can't get from the newbie and help files rule.

As for layers. Think of it kind of like having multiple sheets of transparent plastic. You may make the first layer (background) a colored sheet (usually white) or transparent. When you switch between different layers you can draw stuff there that will sit 'under' the top most layers and 'above' the background. This is a bit like what they do with cell animation in cartoons. If most of the object is one color, then they may color in the entire object with that color, but then go back and add additional 'layers' of other colors on top of that to fill in the details. PSP lets you also define how transparent the layer is too, so you could place text on a layer that is 50% transparent and the background would show through it. Once you 'merge' all the layers (which saving to PNG, JPG, BMP, or anything except PSP's own format will do anyway) then the changes become permanent though, so you are better off using a native PSP file to edit and save changes, then only save the final image as something other people can use.

However, what this means is that you can draw all your boxes on the 'background', then switch to other layers to add in text or other information, either adjusting transparency to let the back ground show through or leaving it solid and drawing directly over the stuff underneath. One really important factor though.. If you fill in a box with color, make sure you are in the ;background layer or it will fill the entire image (you filled an empty layer, not the box in this case). Same with erasing or drawing a blob of color, make sure you are on the right layer and it is doing what you intended. It is easy enough to undo if you mess up, but annoying when it takes you a second of two to figure out what the heck you just did. lol

Your boxes however are probably not visible due to the line width of the boxes. The box is by default the same one pixel wide as the grid, so you can't see it while the grid is on. Try making the width of the boxes lines thicker.

Thanks man - That helped me alot. If you or anyone else knows of a website that will just show me the basics on what i need to know about the program for simple mud map making, please post here. Any other tips are greatly appreciated and im sure will benifet others as well. Thank you.